Project Root Review

Project Root is a top down sandbox high intensity shooter that harks back to the early era of gaming. You will need to sharpen your reflexes as the fast paced action hits hard. You move your craft (the F12 Zonda Ship) around with the analog sticks as you weave your way to your objectives, enemy’s, projectiles and everything in between will be streaming its way to you.

There are a fair variety of foe that are split into two main category’s, right trigger dispatches the air based attackers and left trigger decimate’s anything on the ground. A special attack is reserved for those tight spots and pressing the right bumper releases a satisfying salvo of missiles into the air killing everything within a set radius around you. This gives you a moment to escape for a few more vital seconds. They come in a variety of carnations and are activated by icons that are randomly generated after a kill.

Project Root requires a particular set of skills, a set of skills I’m not sure I have. It will see frustrations running high, due to the sheer amount of enemy’s, gun fire, heat seeking missiles and the volume of bonus objectives my mildly obsessive nature just can’t leave. The first mission opens your eyes to the true intensity of this game which took me a few attempts to complete, mainly due my gung-ho attitude, my depleting health bar from taking to many hits and the three life’s your given.

Dying at the end level boss which depicted itself as a massive pregnant flotilla, spewing out untold amounts of attack craft, laser fire and heat speaking missiles, doesn’t start you just before the battle, not half way through the level but back to the beginning is something I have some issues dealing with. On a harder difficultly that’s fine, it would be for the battle hardened veteran who wanted to test his skill but on easy having to start from the beginning every time you die is a tedium I could do without. It ruins that pick up and play element of this arcade style game, as I personally really enjoy the genre.

Scrapping through the first and next few levels do reward you with experience points that can be spent of a plethora of upgrades to improve speed, agility, weapons both primary and special, airframe and what I chose straight away defence. As it makes you slightly harder to kill but they all make a slight difference to your ship, sadly as each level passes the enemy’s become more intense and a lot harder.

This game has everything on offer but for me doesn’t deliver the way a game like this should, the levels are well designed from pine littered forests, arctic tundras and lava fields. This ship moves well, the enemy’s pop with a satisfying explosion as the games generic electronic anthems play out in the background but it lets everything down with the gameplay. It’s just not enjoyable or satisfying enough to want to play, picking it up and getting annoyed with a game early on really isn’t something you want to do in your spare time.

I have persisted and stuck at it, played and replayed a few levels and you get a glimmer of enjoyment every now and again, maybe if the game offered a co-op mode it could really be a more satisfying experience but that isn’t an option as it’s locked to single player mode only. I give this game 6/10 mainly for my own experience and it’s potential, maybe a better player can squeeze more out of it but sadly I can’t.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.

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